Today, many popular electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) and hand-held media players or portable electronic devices (“PEDs”), are battery powered and include various user interface components. Conventionally, such portable electronic devices include buttons, dials, or touchpads to control the media devices and to allow users to navigate through media assets, including, for example, music, speech, or other audio, movies, photographs, interactive art, text, and media resident on (or accessible through) the media devices, to select media assets to be played or displayed, and/or to set user preferences for use by the media devices. The functionality supported by such portable electronic devices is increasing. At the same time, these media devices continue to get smaller and more portable. Consequently, as such devices get smaller while supporting robust functionality, there are increasing difficulties in providing adequate user interfaces for the portable electronic devices.
Some user interfaces have taken the form of graphical user interfaces or displays which, when coupled with other interface components on the device, allow users to navigate and select media assets and/or set user preferences. However, such graphical user interfaces or displays may be inconvenient, small, or unusable. Other devices have completely done away with a graphical user display.
When devices have no graphical user displays, or displays that are small, poorly illuminated, or unviewable by the user (e.g., an electronic device is in a user's pocket), a user may not be able to graphically identify the audio content being presented via the device. Thus, it may be useful to provide alternate mechanisms for identifying the audio content presented by the device.